Since it’s Labor Day, I will hold off on part 7 of my Mazes and Monsters retro-clone in favor of a bizarre D&D speculation that, with feats of sophist acrobatics that will astound you, I will turn into a celebration of the US federal holiday, and the brave men and women who make up our national workforce.

I work at a software company. The other day, a QA guy told me, “Something is wrong with the wizard.” Somehow, for a moment, I was transported 1000 years back and maybe 2 or so universes sideways. His words filled me with dark portent (even darker portent than his normal words, which are pretty dark, because he’s QA).

Let me try to describe to you the terrifying scenario that – for a fraction of a second – lived inside my head:

Picture yourself a peasant who lives in a peaceful valley; it’s peaceful because the Good Wizard protects it from the evil threats of the outside world. In the immortal words of John Michael Osbourne:

Evil power disappears
Demons worry when the wizard is near
He turns tears into joy
Everyone’s happy when the wizard walks by.

In short, everything’s great in the valley.

Then one day another peasant (a QA peasant, the kind who’s happy to point out that your pigs all seem to have foot-and-mouth disease) tells you, “Something’s wrong with the wizard.”

The vagueness of his statement is what’s unsettling. Does the wizard have a cold? Is he dead? (Hopefully not: last time orcs invaded the valley, the wizard turned them into pigs, which are providing people with bacon right now. Without the wizard, though, it would have been rapine, burning, destruction.)

But there are… worse things that can happen to a wizard than death. And you’re just a peasant, you can’t diagnose or help with any of them. And they all mean bad things for the peaceful valley.

And that’s why it’s so important that Labor organize. If the peasants were to form a militia, they could probably handle a level, say, 3 threat to the valley instead of a level 1 threat. On this day, God Save the Labor Unions and God Save President Grover Cleveland!

Speaking of Labor Day, have you guys heard the Worst Song Ever? It has labor-day-related lyrics.

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